neurotic wreck

Staying with the Bordellos – well loosely at least – here’s Dan from the band who these days appears to be splitting his hours between eking out nuggets with longdrone flowers types as Vukovar – whose debuting album earlier this year is bidding highly to attract votes in our year end summing up – whilst moonlighting on his ridiculously quietly sneaked out solo musings as Neurotic Wreck. Described as windowgaaze – there you go NME-ers bet none of you thought of that as you sat in the local bar ligging, getting fat on advertising revenue and trying to decide which ambulance – sorry wagon – to jump on this week. With an album slated for release on the rather impeccable Small Bear imprint, the five track ‘our lady of the conflagration’ EP is cultured in such blistered finesse as would attractively sit proudly on the CV of any of the more recognisable though lesser talents you’d care to mention that you might find poisoning the playlists of the hype fleeted underground these days. No waste nor trim here, each a gem in its own right with ‘keep breathing’ opening the account, a sunglasses adorned  slice of fizzing slo-cored shoegaziness freefalling ever so seductively into Skywave terrains albeit here as though headed up by a kaleidoscopically frazzled June Panic. Oozed upon an 80’s mainframe, the love noted and lunar lilted ‘mental’ slipstreams into the kind of glacial territories of a classic forgotten flip cut dating from a ‘power corruption and lies’ era New Order whilst the slinky and acutely primal ‘Annalise’ trips out on the kind of prowling seduction of the Doors as rephrased through the Bunnymen on ‘thorn of crowns’. Undoubtedly the sets centrepiece, ‘sad place for a small shadow’ is brimming with  a positive smorgasbord of ideas, it loosely mutates constantly shape shifting, its base marker drawing reference to the Revolutionary Corps of Teenage Jesus and last year’s pairing between Automat and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, its funky dub mosaics ghosted in spectral minimalism allude initially to the creepy whirr of ‘silver shamrock’ motifs before fermenting into a groove not unlike that found on the Bunnymen’s ‘fuel’ whereupon the rhythmic tones skitter and scatter falling away only to reassemble anew to drive the psychotropic hypno-groove into a different direction – frankly he ought to consider a locked groove wax variant of it. For us though just edging matters in the affection stakes the parting ‘always joking’ finds the classical enigmatic threads of Joy Division descending like an eerie mist upon the creeping riff fissures of a youthful Bauhaus, a smoking gun that veers with steel eyed cool intent nodding to Gun Club yet more crucially frayed, fried and blistered by the kind of fragmented edginess that coursed through the darkly bleak grooves of the Birthday Party’s ‘junkyard’.  https://neuroticwreck.bandcamp.com/album/our-lady-of-conflagration-ep